The Siren and the Star
by The Sky Pirate Girl
Summary: Ino dreams of love but there is no love destined for her. AsuIno, reupload.
1. the siren

_(__I was looking for a breath of life; __a__ little touch of heavenly light__... b__ut all the choirs in my head sang "no"__...)_

When Ino was a child she and Sakura constantly argued about who Sasuke liked more (Ino did not really like him, although she liked being good-naturedly teased by her friends about _someone_). Once when they were wandering in the lower distincts of Konoha, they met an old hag that claimed she was a Seer. They did not believe her for a second. But then the vile woman forcefully grasped Sakura's hand, looked hard at it, and told her that she would find love in the strongest man in the village. Triumphant, the pink-haired girl boasted that she would one day marry Sasuke Uchiha. Not to be outdone, Ino gave the woman her own hand.

"I do not see your love," the witch told her after much pestering by Ino's side. Even Sakura did not dare laugh now.

"So, I won't live long enough to fall in love?" she asked. Already thirteen, but she was a shinobi, after all.

"I do not know. But your life line is long." The old hag waved a hand dismissively. "Never mind, nothing good comes out of love in any case. Love is frail, dies like a flower in the winter. You are lucky that you might never know it - fat lot of good it did to me..."

This somewhat made the girl depressed for the whole day.

Maybe love simply was not suited to Ino Yamanaka.

Although she didn't see what was the point of living, other than fighting for her homeland, that is. The selfish part of her still did not understand.

Since that day she felt chained by destiny. Superficial, she knew but still...

Holding onto the image of the most wanted boy desperately into her mind, Ino let herself react to the way the other people saw her, becoming her own reflection. After the _traitor_ had gone, and Sakura had lost her believes in everything holy and fair, Ino decided this: to hell with destiny. To hell with appearances. To hell with love. To hell with everything.

If only just the need to stop believing in them could suffice.

_(__Though the pressure's hard to take, __i__t's the only way I can escape__; __seems a heavy choice to make, __b__ut now I am under, __o__h.__)_

The year after Sasuke, she had Asuma-sensei train her for the next chuunin exams. Asuma-sensei was _great_ - he was tough and raggedy handsome, strong, grander than life, unreachable, unbeatable in her eyes.

He was like the most distant of the stars and she found herself missing him the most when he was right next to her.

Ino trains and trains and learns jutsus and expands her chakra and wields kunai and shuriken and mindfucks her enemies and sometimes, unknowingly and without any effort on her part, mindfucks her closest people two. She thinks only Shikamaru has figured her out. Lazy bum was the only one smart enough to see the line of her thoughts. She sometimes thinks he figures out things for her before she did.

It does not make her feel comfortable but Ino is not one for feeling and thinking hard about life these days.

Train, study, learn, prepare. Get ready. Fight.

She becomes a chuunin.

Sakura even leaves her medical studies for the night being, Shikamaru takes a day out from his jounin trainings, Chouji invites them all over at his place.

With Sakura and Kiba, who had recently started dating, against her and her best guy friends on her both sides and sake in her hand, she feels content. Happy even. She feels like she has started making a progress, making a difference in almost all of her areas of interest. Great, amazing, true friends: something that's not very frequent these days. Fantastic family that loved her and accepted her wholeheartedly and doted upon her. Great future ahead of her - she'll try for the intelligence division.

Nothing could defeat her.

Except the one thing that was missing, of course.

_(__But I needed one more touch__, a__nother taste of heavenly rush__, a__nd I believe; I believe it so...__)_

Despite everything, Ino finds herself obsessing over fate yet again. She wants to understand it, to dissect it, to analyze it and research it.

And when, and only when she sees Asuma-sensei's palm - only when she sees that his destiny is not written in the stars, that he does not have a destiny... she feels a great chunk of the weight of her curse being liberated from her shoulders.

She realizes why that is the day she almost loses him. The day they both almost die.

Because the witch's prophecy had failed. Because...

Because she saved him when every odd was against her and something in her screamed raw that she would fight a thousand wars, rather than let the vulnerable man in her arms die.

Because...

_(__And it's over, __a__nd I'm going under,__ b__ut I'm not giving up! I'm just giving in.__)_

She finds herself a bit angry at the feeling that constantly builds inside her chest whenever he is around. That is actually a bit of the understatement. But she is not one famous for cowardice. If anything, she could be brave. Or at least pretend to be brave which is almost the same thing.

She seeks his friendship. He gives it to her, hesitantly, somewhat untrustingly and half-unwillingly.

And shows her a whole new world and she sees him for all he is - arrogant, a bit haughty and a bit odd and a lot genius (almost as genius as her best friend, although she likes this Asuma so much that she wonders if _he_ isn't her best friend now).

Of course, it scares her. She is sixteen, in love with an amazing, older man who only sees her as his student and friend. But she has taught herself that love is not the most important thing. Chanted in her head like a mantra ever since she was thirteen, really. Prayed for it to become a true belief until it almost became and the difference could not be noticed without a really proficient look-over.

Ino is a fighter, she goes on. She is oddly also a bit disappointed: she expected grief and tears and melodrama and a whole good chunk of teenage angst but the only thing she managed was a 'it sucks, he might never become my lover but that's it and life keeps moving forward' and some other philosophical, write-me-down-worthy shit.

Ino figures that she has grown up sooner than most of the normal people. But then again, she is a shinobi, decidedly _not_ most of the normal people.

Life keeps moving forward.

But then, _that_ happened and she and he and a few other people, but mainly she and mainly he, were royally screwed up.

_(__I took the stars from my eyes__ a__nd then I made a map, I knew that some how__I could find my way back__;__t__hen I heard your heart beating, you were in the darkness too,  
__s__o I stayed in the darkness with you__...)_

She misses him. A lot. She misses his friendship, she misses his advices (he is the only person she respects enough to listen to), she misses his smell, hell she misses his beard and his stupid death-sticks. Because they rarely see each other nowadays, even at the streets.

She throws herself into missions, looks for something, someone, anything, anyone to fill the space that this coward, this _bastard_ left in her. He throws himself in reckless abandon, S-level missions and all that fuck.

Until he volunteers to be her back-up on one of her missions. And decides that then, at the _one_ field she really thrived, it is time to show her how she really isn't all that independent as she wants to be.

How dare he. How _dare_ he. _How_...

_(__And I always say__ w__e should be together__; __I can see below__'__c__ause there's something in here__; a__nd if you are gone__I will not belong here__)_

Their friendship slowly begins to mend, because he misses it and she misses it and they both are selfish enough as that.

He once tells her there is no destiny and for once, and twice and the rest of her life, she is inclined to believe him. Because she now understands that she _is_ a fighter and she will never again let herself be swayed by someone else's words. She now knows that one, for all his grief and hardships, does not get a happily ever after, or love, or _life_ simply because he deserves it. She now knows that if you want something as badly as she did, you have to fight for it.

And this is precisely why she tells him that she loves him.

He does not confirm his feelings for her. But she will fight for him. Because he does not deny them either.

_(__Oh, slipping underneath.__O__h, so cold, but so sweet__...)_

She gets him in the end, of course.

And a few years later, she gets even more than she had ever bargained for.

On the day of the first year since the war ended, she goes to the river along with the rest of the villagers. Asuma tucks an orange flower in her hair; her eyes laugh and dance merrily around the people and the water and the Hokage monument. She spots Sakura and goes to talk to her.

The fireworks begin and she feels dark eyes upon her. Feeling lighter than she had in months (what with the morning sickness and unfriendly disposed towards her bladder), in spite of the battle scars that today ached a bit, she felt something shine inside of her - freedom. _Nothing_ could beat her.

In the end, Ino realized she had not feared the woman's words so much. They had simply been the reflection of something that already existed deep in the dark corners of the kunoichi inside her.

But she had fought her fears. And _oh_, how far had she come.

Asuma walks towards her and her heart thuds lightly at his approach. She feels the sudden irrational urge to pinch his cheek and he kisses the tip of her nose, smiles into her, kisses her full on the lips. Behind her Sakura smirks. Not that she sees her. She dances among the stars and her chest sings _(it's you, it's you, it has always been you)._


	2. the star

She was beautiful - far too beautiful for him, and far too young. Underneath all her masks she was cold and distant. He frequently wondered what made her so frosted and more often than not came to the conclusion that she was not suited for the life of an assassin, shinobi.

His student was born for sunny days and flowers. She was born to be vibrant and vivid - a bright star in a sky of fireflies, a sole cricket in a world of silence.

_-You are the hole in my head, you are the space in my bed, you are the silence in between; what I thought and what I said-_

"I want you to take me seriously, Asuma-sensei," she once pouted, but her eyes were berating and made him feel guilty. "I want to be able to protect those I love with my best."

There was a spark in her eyes as they trained together.

"You and I, we both have affinity to the wind," he told her after that particularly tiring training session. They both lay on the green grass and in a true Shikamaru fashion, watched the clouds pass.

"We're born under one of the air signs, after all," she quietly said. "You, me and Naruto."

It was then when he first realized that she had a liking to the astrology. Ino was a walking contradiction and, as always, he failed to understand her heart, her mind.

_- This is as good a place to fall as any, we'll build our altar here -_

On their way to Konoha after a nasty mission, team Asuma stopped in the forest for a rest.

Hidden behind the shadows of a big tree, Choui cracked a joke and Shikamaru laughed, handing him a sandwich.

Ino, who sat next to Asuma, caught her leader's hand.

"Let me see," she murmured as she healed a small cut there. He thanked her and tried to pull his hand away, but she did not let go. Instead, her fingers traced the lines of his palms.

"You don't have a fate line," she told him.

"What does that mean?" he asked, voice barely above a whisper (how he hated the fact that she was bewitching him with her foreign, siren-like language).

She released his hand.

"According to my book, it means that you are the smith of your own destiny."

"So, it is not set on stone?"

"It is not written in the stars."

He remembered that Kurenai also lacked the line. Hmm...

Unconsciously he took his student's hand and looked at her palm. Unfortunately, he was uneducated when it came to this area.

Asuma looked at the girl helplessly, wordlessly asking her to translate the language of her skin.

Ino smiled, in true Ino fashion - the kind of a smile that infuriated him. The kind of a smile that told him that she knew something that he did not - and no, she was not about to tell him.

"If you wait, you'll see."

The way she worded her thought made him release her hand and look away, his heart drumming in his ribs.

"Hey, Ino, you want a sandwich?" Shikamaru asked as he handed one to his sensei.

The man saw her cheeks flare and comically fill with air, and her brows lock together in a frown.

"Of course not! Idiot! I ate during the last break - do you actually want me to get fat?"

Asuma, sweating, took a deep drag of the cigar in his mouth.

_- The heart is hard to translate, it has a language of its own; it talks in tongues and quiet sighs and prayers and proclamations -_

One mission later and he was breaking apart in the hospital hallway, somehow knowing that Chouji was not going to live through the night.

Kurenai was away on a mission but right now he needed her so badly it physically hurt.

Shikamaru was in the next operation room though his health was by far better than that of his team-mate's.

Then, there was Ino - sweet, little Ino - who, without needing any explanation or prompting, came to him and embraced him.

Asuma buried his head in the crook of her neck, choked on his own breath.

"It will be alright," she murmured.

Her bruised hands soothed his eternally disheveled hair and she whispered sweet nothings into his ear until there was night no more.

In the end, Chouji survived.

in the end, Asuma had stopped wishing for Kurenai to be there for him.

_- Never let me go, never let me go; the arms of the ocean are carrying me, and all this devotion was rushing out of me, and the crashes Iare heaven, for a sinner like me -_

For all her social appearances, Asuma realized as he watched her worry over a wilting flower in her family shop, Ino was actually - deep, deep inside - a rather serene and gentle person.

Of course, she was also bossy, and loud, and secretly insecure, and emotionally unstable. And she made him sweat over his attempts to decode her like an unnecessarily difficult game of shogi.

But - in her core - she was like the morning wind that swept through the leaves of the trees.

Somehow, he thought as he watched her dance inside her family's garden after the flower was brought back to life by her chakra, in their essences they were the same.

_- In the dark, I can hear your heartbeat, I try to find the sound -_

And then, one day, she saved him - pumped her chakra into his wounds, stubbornly refusing to give up on him; sobbing his name and hitting at his chest with her healing chakra until she fainted - and he realized that he loved her.

It may have been the fact that his relationship with Kurenai was not at its best times, or the fact that _she_ was so warm and so cool at the same time, and he liked to imagine that she entranced him like a siren would entrance a sailor.

_- There is love in your body but you can't hold it in; it pours from your eyes and spills from your skin -_

Admittedly, right now, as he dragged her drunken ass out of the bar she was decidedly not siren-like. Although, her wandering hands begged to differ.

"Asuma," she huskily whispered as he gently laid her in the bed of her new apartment (the reason they celebrated themselves so drunk). "Stay, please."

"You don't want this," he reasoned with her. "In the morning when you sober up, you'll bitterly regret it."

Then he moved to stand up (_get-away-as-fast-as-you-can-before-you-succumb-to- your-most-primitive-instincts_), but her hand caught his.

"How could I? I've wanted this for the longest time!"

Something in him stirred - his desire to be with her surfaced.

"Not like this. Not right now. I don't want to take advantage of you."

"I _want_ you to take advantage of me. And I want to take advantage of _you_."

_Aww - screw it._

When he woke up in the morning and she was lying peacefully in his arms, he felt pure, unadulterated hatred for himself.

It burned down his stomach like acid, especially more so after he saw the blood on her white sheets.

Cursing himself, he stood up as quickly as he could (muttering swears yet again as he waited the wave of dizziness and nausea to go away).

He kept away from her in the next weeks, avoiding her _and_ Kurenai (he couldn't look at any of them in the eyes).

_- This is his body, this is his love; such selfish prayers and I can't enough -_

The life as he knew it ended when _Kurenai_ came to him and told him that she was pregnant. And that the child was not his.

"I love you, Asuma - really, I do. But I couldn't just wait for you to love me. I've always strived for something more... Life, the life of a shinobi especially, is too short for any of us to wait."

He did not know what to say (did not have the bravery to ask her who _the hell_ was the father then).

He did not know what to do with himself long after Kurenai had left him alone with his thoughts.

- _This is a gift, it comes with a price; who is the lamb and who is the knife? -_

His life swiftly changed _again_ when Ino was sent on her first mission that would potentially involve seduction.

Some raw instinct within him made him volunteer to go as her backup, much to the surprise of the rest of his team, the Hokage and - not lastly - himself.

Asuma didn't think that those kind of missions were suited for Ino Yamanaka (even if _she_ was suited for _them_).

It was hell - on their way to the target the atmosphere was so tight and awkward and _dangerous_ that he could cut it with a kunai and set it alight with his cigar. They didn't speak unless it was absolutely necessary. When they did, her voice was hot poison and whenever he opened his mouth, he always came out more short-tempered than he liked.

During the mission, they were caught and for a moment he was forced to watch their target - a crime lord - attempt to violate his student. But the bastard didn't know how far Asuma Sarutobi was willing to go for this woman, had absolutely no idea how hard he was willing to fight for her.

After the mission, they got into an argument. Or at least, Ino attempted to get into an argument with him. She insisted that she could have taken the crime lord down, without _his_ help and angrily hit at his chest.

"I know," he agreed softly, and felt so relieved to see her well enough to be angry that he couldn't help the _bliss_ that warmed its way to his heart.

"No, you don't know, _Asuma_! For you, I've always been the shallow, pathetic girl that doesn't think about anything but clothes and boys! You never _once_ took me seriously!"

"That's not true, Ino," he replied and -had he not been so damn deliriously _happy_ - he would have probably fallen for her provocations and shouted back. But he didn't.

His lack of will to fight didn't stop her. Ino was a force to be reckoned with, especially if she was enraged at you beforehand.

He let her vent out and afterwards took her in his arms.

_- And is it worth the wait, all this killing time? Are you strong enough to stand, protecting both your heart and mine? -_

Their friendship slowly began to mend and they started sparring in the afternoons again.

One night, after a _serious_ sparring session, they lay on the grass and looked at the stars.

"Do you believe that it is all written, up there?" she asked in a voice so little, so small and needy for it to be true.

"No," Asuma bluntly admitted.

"I think I believe you," Ino said darkly. "But, if you don't believe that you have an already written path, wouldn't it be easier to get lost?"

Asuma felt his lips twitch upward.

"Ino, I get lost and confused all the time."

"You do?" she asked, genuinely surprised.

"Yeah."

It took her a moment to process this new piece of information. She then caught his hand, not looking away from the sky.

"Then we will be lost together," she announced. "'s not so bad."

Asuma growled in agreement, feeling too content to say anything else. It seemed she took the hint, for she did not say anything and they remained silent. For five minutes.

"I love you, you know that?"

Asuma felt the urge to pull out his hair.

_There she goes again, changing my life._

For once, he didn't reply (his voice simply betrayed him), though he believed (_knew, hoped_) that Ino had taken comfort in the fact that he had not denied his ability to love her back.

_-There is love in your body but you can't get it out; it gets stuck in your head, won't come out of your mouth-_

They decided to go out on a unofficial date.

It was in the morning, when they both loved to go out the most, and over breakfast (vanilla pudding with lemon tea for her; coffee and omelet with sausages for him) they talked about trivial day-to-day things.

The novels she had read, or the games of shogi he had played with Shikamaru. Something interesting she had learned or the strategies he had used in battles. They interacted, they discussed things, debated over themes.

It was almost like they were not on a date, but simply enjoyed each other's company as all the times they had done before - only that this time, they were alone; this time, they were trying to see if they _worked_ together.

He could see that when lunch time came and went (luckily they were both free for the day), Ino was giddy with happiness.

She was truly warm and unperturbed by life. There was this spark in her eyes that made all the rest of the world seem dull and gray and Asuma wistfully imagined her to be like this every day; he wistfully imagined coming home to this every evening.

She actually _agreed_ to eat a three-flavored ice-cream with him and tried to flirt with him all the while.

She was like a small child in love and he suddenly realized that this was very wrong - she was barely eighteen and she couldn't know what she was getting herself in.

"Ino we'll never work out… We'll be the ridicule of Konoha, the odd mismatched pair," he said abruptly, tr-

But she kissed him, _kissed_ him - kissing away all of his resistances and _- damn it!_ - he was only just a man.

She was a kunoichi, he reasoned, trying to ease his guilty consciousness, she had fought and killed and robbed and sacrificed herself in the name of duty.

_But_, his guilty consciousness reasoned back, she was eighteen too and she trusted him and needed him not to hurt her.

And Asuma couldn't promise not to hurt her.

_-There's a drumming noise inside my head that starts when you're around; I swear that you could hear it -it makes such an almighty sound-_

Asuma realized, by their second month as a couple, that he could _actually_ be jealous. _And_ possessive. _And_ that as his lover, Ino liked to pick more fights with him and provoke his already short temper more than when she had been his student.

He noticed, however, that by the time they made up again, something had shifted and they were even closer than before.

It was inevitable for them to be together. They were like two different galaxies that drew each other in by sheer gravitation - they were bound to clash and collide and merge into one, sooner or later.

_-And all my stumbling phrases never amounted to anything worth this feeling-_

The fondest memory he had of their bickerings was when, once, he lounged around his apartment with his lit cigar in his mouth in a true Asuma fashion, looking for his lover (he would later tell their friends, when she was out of earshot, that he had rather felt like a lost puppy) when he found her in the kitchen, preparing to make an omelet.

She indignantly yelled for him to 'stop puffing those damned death sticks in her face, _especially_ when she was cooking - she would _not_ have their breakfast taste like an ash-tray.'

And she even waved her pan in an offensive fashion (technically his pan).

Something in her words made him feel very warm inside and think that a thing like this could never have happened with someone like Kurenai.

His cigar almost fell from his mouth but he quickly found back his dignity, made a half-hearted retort and ultimately put out the 'death stick'.

_- all this heaven never could describe such a feeling as I'm having; words were never so useful, so I was screaming out a language that I never knew existed before-_

A war had come and passed before they decided to announce their relationship to the world - she was twenty one and he asked her to move in with him. She agreed. He still cringed whenever he remembered Inoichi's reaction.

Admittedly, it might have been because Ino was already four months pregnant at the time and the enraged father still had not known whom was he to murder.

She was eight months pregnant when the whole village celebrated the first year since the end of the war. There were fireworks, games, songs, plays and flowers - he tucked an orange-petalled one behind her ear.

Ino looked at him affectionately, lovingly and suddenly he felt complete.

Later, when she had gone to talk to the Hokage's wife, another round of fireworks began and his eyes searched her in the crowd.

Their gazes met, she smiled - warm and beautiful and so very close to his heart - and he realized that he now understood her language.

_-Never let me go, never let me go; never let me go, never let me go-_

* * *

**A/N**_: _I hope that it is clear enough that in the end, Sakura fell in love with, and married Naruto_.  
_

Anyways, thank you for reading (and reviewing?)!  
*heart*


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